There are several proposed methods for determining automobile and pedestrian traffic data by aggregating cell phone data on location, speed and direction. Several companies have developed methods for taking raw data and interpreting them, for example, Intellione, whose brochures located on www.intellione.com, state that for each second, io-traffic™ collects and aggregates millions of GPS and mobile phone locations, creates road speeds, then paints a live picture of traffic conditions in a geographic area. Such a method requires an incredible amount of data collection and analysis. Moreover, after collecting such data, it is limited in its usefulness as it relates only to traffic issues.
There are other methods for determining traffic flow such as network probes which monitor voice data as it passes through the network and other methods which involve installing “sniffers” into the core radio infrastructure (BSC/RNC). Device probes can be programmed to send location/direction/speed data to a central database on certain intervals. These all have drawbacks. Network probes are expensive. Infrastructure enhancements will take years to bring to market. Device probes are unreliable for “ad hoc” demands for a particular area and are battery and network intensive and often end up generating data that isn't used or useful.